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Saving for retirement was once a lot easier than it is now.

Your employer offered you a pension, which guaranteed you a certain amount of income in retirement.

Now, your employer offers you a 401(k) plan -- if you’re lucky. Or maybe "lucky" isn't quite the word, considering it comes along with an obstacle course of retirement challenges: getting around to setting aside your own money, figuring out how much you need to put away, and choosing the best investments for it. Then, once you’ve reach retirement, you get burdened with another monumental task: figuring out how to turn that into enough income in retirement that you will be able to live comfortably but not so comfortably that you deplete your savings in your lifetime — an easy feat, since we all know our own expiration date, right? And if you don’t do all that correctly, then tough luck.

Now that the shift from pensions to 401(k)s is nearly complete, and now that baby boomers are starting to retire — 10,000 will turn 65 every day for the next 17 years — and especially because they are retiring just a few years after many saw their portfolios fall precipitously, the deficiencies of the 401(k) are becoming readily apparent.

According to the LIMRA Secure Retirement Institute, while 49% of those 80 and older had a pension, only 7% of workers under age 30 have one, and in between is a steady drop-off. And now the current state of affairs is bleak: “Less than half of all workers have a retirement plan at work, and even the typical near-retirement worker with a 401(k) plan only has enough money in their retirement accounts to provide a monthly check of $575—nowhere near enough money for a secure retirement,” according to American Retirement Savings Could Be Much Better, an August report by the Center for American Progress. While many workers can also expect some money from Social Security and Individual Retirement Accounts, the vast majority are still woefully unprepared to support themselves in their golden years.

“The 401(k) has worked for some people but for most it’s been a failure,” says David Madland, director of the American Worker Progress and author of the CAP report. “Most people don’t accumulate enough money to retire and maintain they standard of living. The system has so many holes, it makes it unreasonably hard for someone to make it to a secure retirement. We’ve stacked the deck against someone for no reason except that we’ve designed a poor system that happens to benefit some people on Wall Street.”

The Government Accountability Office recently released a study of other nations’ 401(k)-like systems, noting that they offer several options of how to take your nest egg besides the lump sum and have higher standards for financial advisors, among other advantages.

But that is how those other countries are tackling the problems of 401(k)-like retirement vehicles. What are some American ideas on how to improve our 401(k) mess? Here is one innovative program already in effect, along with two proposals.

I. Dimensional Fund Advisors’ Managed DC

So, while the 401(k)’s flaws are fairly clear, what hasn’t yet been mentioned is why it supplanted the pension. The reason is not trifling: Pensions required companies to make a certain payout even if the underlying investments didn’t perform that well, which isn’t exactly a sustainable setup. But even though the 401(k) trumps the pension in this regard, its drawbacks, as shown above, now far outweigh this benefit.

For that reason, Dimensional Fund Advisors, the exclusive money management and mutual fund company that inspires such a passionate following among its clients that it is often compared to a cult, has come up with a retirement plan that assists participants in one of the main challenges of the common 401(k): turning the lump sum into a steady stream of income in retirement.

The back end of this SmartNest plan is an investment strategy meant to improve returns over time that focuses on small-cap stocks, low price-to-book stocks (which can sometimes signal a stock is underpriced), and stocks of companies with higher operating profits.

On the front end (dubbed “Managed DC”), participants get a radically different experience from that provided in most 401(k) plans today. In retirement planning, the conventional wisdom is that you need to know “your number” — the total nest egg you need to amass by a certain date in order to have enough to live on the rest of your life.

Managed DC ditches all that and goes straight to the income calculation. In other words, participants experience it as a pension. Well, sort of.

What they actually get is a Web interface that allows them to manipulate sliders to see how their retirement income would be affected if they changed one of four variables: “a desired income target, which might default to 50% of one’s preretirement income and the probably of achieving it; a conservative income target, which by default has a 96% probably of success; pretax contributions; and retirement age,” as described by Forbes’ Matt Schifrin.

Sliders are provided that let you perform what-if scenarios. If you want to change your desired income from $5,000 per month to $6,000, the probability of you achieving that might drop from 75% to 35%. The only way to get back up to 75% would be to move the slider for pretax contributions from 4% up to 8% or slide your retirement age from, say, 65 to 70.

But what makes it much easier for participants is that moving the sliders then readjusts the investments in the background; the consumer is relieved of the burden of all the complicated calculations necessary to make their desired changes happen. (Currently, Managed DC is only available at a few companies.)

II. The SAFE Retirement Plan

The second way to improve the 401(k) that we’ll outline is the proposal from the CAP report. According to Madland, who wrote the report along with Rowland Davis, the current 401(k) system has four main problems, and here is how they propose to solve each:

1. Increase Access

“You only have about half of workers having access to their 401(k) plan in the workplace,” says Madland. To address this issue, the SAFE proposal would automatically enroll people in their retirement plans, instead of requiring employees to sign up for their employers’ plans. It would also make 401(k)s available to everyone, including those not full-time employed, such as freelancers. To make them available to everyone, a marketplace would offer options, much like the health care exchanges, and everyone would be able to take their 401(k) with them, even when they switch employers.